OT: PC blues... with Bonjour and TiVo... Ideas...?

[SKYLANE]

I have a mixed PC and Mac network here at home. I have printers hooked up to two Airport Express units, works really slick for both PC and Mac access on the network. Bonjour has always run perfect on my PCs at home for finding the printers on the Airport Express units.

My parents are having two issues on a PC. By the way, they are running XP on a Dell GX260 (2 GHz P4). They also have McAfee running on it (from AOL) with the firewall that comes with it. The following two issues are nagging them on the PC:

Issue 1: TiVo Desktop

When I launch this program (latest version installed) on their PC, I keep seeing a dialogue box that says something like "TiVo Beacon is not running". The software does not even get past that. After numerous online searches, have turned up empty handed on solutions. Beginning to wonder if the AOL/McAfee Firewall settings is causing issues?

Issue 2: Bonjour

This software runs wonderful on my PCs. My parents had quite an issue getting a Mac Mini to see a shared printer on the PC GX 260. So, I had them hook it to the Mac Mini (10.5.1) to share it. Then downloaded Bonjour to the PC so that it could hopefully easily find the shared Mac Printer. When Launching Bonjour I see a dialogue box that says something like "Bonjour cannot start". Again, beginning to wonder if the AOL/McAfee Firewall settings is causing issues?

I also use the AOL/McAfee software. I don't recall if I left the AOL/McAfee firewall active or the XP Firewall active. In any case, Bonjour works just fine on my GX260. I am going to try TiVo desktop from my GX260 later to see if it has same issues.

Thoughts on either issue...?

[DRR]

They both sound like firewall issues to me. On your parents network, just disable all firewalls and see if the problem resolves. You probably want to disconnect from your WAN connection before you do this, just in case.

Tivo Beacon is a service that lets tivos see each other on the network. If Tivo Desktop is installed normally, Tivo Beacon should start up automatically when Tivo Desktop is started. Check to make sure Tivo Beacon is set to start up automatically, if it is, it is probably complaining because the port it wants to use is blocked by firewall software.

Probably the same type of problem with Bonjour. Isn't Windows fun.

[SKYLANE]

DRR...

Yep, Firewall issues. Was able to run both of them with the Firewall disabled. Now have to figure out what I did during installation that caused the Firewall to block it.

Thanks... Jeff